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January 23, 2007

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: whomsoever

whomsoever. /HOOM·so·evuh/. Not originally an Indian English word, it is nonetheless a vestige of the British bureaucrat-raj of yore in present-day India's babucracy. This word is used to begin formal correspondence where the addressee is unknown, as in "To Whomsoever It May Concern". The U.S. equivalent, as you may have guessed, is "To Whom It May Concern" (I don't know if it's just me, but 'whomsoever' sounds a lot more... dismissive than 'whom').

The word occurs in the Bible (King James Version), in the gospel of Matthew as "Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he". But even the contemporary English Standard version of the Bible has moved on, choosing to use "The one" in place of "whomsoever". If you google for whomsoever, most of the hits are sources linked somehow to India. It's safe to say then that 'whomsoever' is now Indian English.

Posted by Vishy at 03:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2007

Google Personalized Home Update: please bring back the old one!

Google's Personalized Homepage just rolled out an update. With the new features, you can expand the contents of a feed item on the homepage itself, without leaving Google. An example of what this looks like is below:

I can't say I am a huge fan of this update. I have several feeds on my personalized home page -- maybe two tabs, each with 15 feeds. The large number of plus signs indicating that an item can be expanded adds a lot of unnecessary visual noise. The timestamp attached to each item is also mystifying. Even an honest to goodness RSS reader, like Google Reader does not feature them so prominently. On my Google Reader's expanded view, the timestamp appears in grayed out text on the top right of each item's enclosing rectangle. I appreciate why the timestamps were put in. Given the narrow rectangle allotted to each feed though, they do nothing more than add to the visual noise.

The personalized homepage from Windows Live presents expanded feed items much more tastefully than its competitor from Google. I understand Google may want to keep the personalized home close to its minimalist ethos--no Javascript, floating divs or fade-ins and fade-outs. Still, Google can learn a thing or two from how Live.com presents its wares. At the very minimum, I'd like the option to remove timestamps and expand buttons from my Google Homepage so as to reduce my informational and visual overload.

On a somewhat related point, real RSS readers or pretend ones like the Google Personalized Home make me feel awful by actually trying to be an Inbox For The Web (tm). RSS is not email. All the bolded folders with the counts of unread messages only serve to remind me how behind I am on my reading. I subscribe to many closely related feeds, which share a lot of duplicates among themselves. I may not even need to read the 45 items marked unread on the Slashdot feed because I may already have seen them on digg, Techdirt or Techmeme. I have no choice processing email; I must eventually process every single message that lands in my inbox. But RSS feeds are different; I subscribe to a feed because I want to pick and choose what I want to read from it, and not be constantly reminded how much of it I haven't read. Will some UI whiz please come up with an RSS reader with a fluid UI?

Posted by Vishy at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2007

How safe are U.S. states relative to other countries?

If you're an American citizen looking to travel outside the U.S., the U.S. State Department advises you to check its travel bulletin about countries that may pose a threat to you. Violence, political instability, infectious diseases and a whole bunch of other causes can lead to a country ending up in the State Department's watchlist.

What about security and safety within the U.S. though? The U.S. has the highest rates of poverty and other high-risk factors for crime among developed economies. While idly browsing NationMaster and StateMaster, I thought of eyeballing per-capita homicide rates in U.S. states and comparing them with per-capita homicide rates around the world (the per-capita homicide rate, in this case, acts as a very rough proxy for 'safety', a very subjective term).

Each state above is labeled with the country that most closely matches its per-capita homicide rate. If you are from California, you can figure that you have just as big a chance, give or take a few percent, of getting murdered in Zambia as at home. Likewise with Texas and Poland.

The states are also colored along a gradient. In other words, if you are from India, you are safer at home than in Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico and other states colored darker than Colorado, Rhode Island and New Jersey. Or maybe you'll get the sobering realization that Wyoming is only as safe as Azerbaijan. Louisiana led the nation in per-capita homicides in 2002, a number that comes close to Mexico's per-capita homicide rate per 10,000 people. The lowest per-capita homicide rate was recorded in North Dakota, whose numbers come close to those of Greece.

Only five countries in the above list are more dangerous than the entire United States: Colombia, South Africa, Jamaica, Venezuela and Russia. Countries safer than the entire United States included Hong Kong, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Interestingly, Saudi Arabia appears on the current State Department warning list.

There are lies, damn lies and statistics, but let's occasionally let the numbers speak for themselves!

Posted by Vishy at 12:04 AM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2007

Google Promotes Google Checkout on Home Page

There have been a number of recent reports about Google according their offerings privileged visibility over competing services even if they are not necessarily the best in their class. Ordinarily I would think it's logical for a company to promote its own products. Google, though, has unfortunately set itself up for all the flak it is getting because of its insistence on user experience to the point of an evangelistic creed.

I was surprised then to find that Google defiled its home page, that Helen of Web pages that inspired a thousand pages like itself, with a promotion of its own Checkout product. Without a doubt, Google has worked hard and earned the right to promote its own product on the most heavily viewed page in the world. Is it in the best interests of its users though, to have yet another link on that formerly pristine Google home page?

Google may have promised never to advertise anything on its front page that is not relevant; they clarified this position in their response to this unaffiliated page. Then came the advertisements for the Google Search toolbar, which I tolerated because at least they are search related. After all, when arriving at a search home page, seeing an ad for a search tool is not all that irrelevant.

Putting a Google Checkout promo on the front page is something else though. Although Google won't release exact numbers, it is fair to estimate that end users of Google outnumber advertisers by a factor of 1000 to 1. Is it really relevant to subject all visitors to google.com to a product promotion when at most 0.1% are in its target market?

Google is facing competition from competing ad platforms as well as from users who have wised up enough not to click on an online ad. I can see why they are more aggressive about putting pointers to their products on search result pages. Heck, even the tips fracas isn't as bad as this, because at the end of the day you can argue for its relevance to the user's search query. An unnecessary Checkout promo on the Google home page can point to only two things: either Google cares less about its front page user experience, or Google Checkout is doing badly. Or is it both?

[Update: I was wrong about assuming that the target of the above promotion were Google's advertisers. The promotion is indeed aimed at its users. Still, waving $10 at users to get their credit card information when they just want to find some information on the web is distracting and not relevant to their intent. And if I eyeballed the above and got annoyed with my assessment, albeit a mistaken one, why wouldn't others?]

Posted by Vishy at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2007

iPhone's missing piece: the developer platform?

This post is inspired by a brief conversation I had with Raven.

Amid all the breathless hype around Apple's iPhone announcement yesterday, there was a conspicuous lack of coverage about the openness of the platform. Apple kept mum about a developer platform around iPhone and how open a platform it was going to be. Would it be as closed as the iPod/iTunes duo, for which there is no way to write meaningful applications without reverse engineering? Or would it be as open as development for the general Mac platform, complete with an SDK and a developers' network?

We can perhaps divine the answer to this from Wall Street's reaction to this announcement yesterday. Apple stock rose approximately the same amount percentage-wise that RIM's stock fell. In other words, the market expects iPhone to encroach on RIM's customer base, which is largely made up of enterprises. There is no way Apple can keep the iPhone platform closed and expect enterprises to adopt it. If the market is right (as it usually is), then we should see some overtures from Apple towards providing a proper development platform around the iPhone.

Let's look ahead to when an SDK and other platform components for the iPhone will stream forth from Apple.

[Update: I was totally wrong on this count; I spoke too early. The following day, Steve Jobs clarified that the platform will be closed, just like the iPod. There will be no developer toolkits and community as with desktop Mac applications. And so Apple remains a consumer electronics company at heart and in direction.

I think Apple is sabotaging adoption of its iPhone with this move. Enterprises won't pick it up because the platform is not open enough. Consumers won't pick it up because the phone is tied to Cingular, which (at least anecdotally) has the 'fewest dropped calls of any network' because you can't make calls in the first place with its coverage. Apple's two-year exclusive deal with Cingular, and the price tag aren't exactly going to help either.

And as you might expect, RIM and Palm stock have recovered by quite a bit.]

Posted by Vishy at 10:51 AM | Comments (2)

January 05, 2007

CES graphic leads me down the garden path (but not quite)

Oh no! My usually picky grammatical sense took a drubbing today.

Most of the time I read technology-related writing produced by other techies, who are more loosey-goosey than the average professional writer when using language. We techies are accustomed to enervating neologisms (folksonomy, cluetrain, feewall) and plainly wrong part of speech usages (architect as a verb, ask as a noun). I've been getting less worked up about these minor issues because lately I am becoming more of a linguistic descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist.

Nevertheless, I may have let down my prescriptivist guard just a little too much when I saw this graphic and was led down a garden path interpretation (see the link for some good examples of garden path newspaper headlines).

I interpreted gather above not as a verb but as a noun, a synonym for gathering. In other words, I parsed the sentence at the bottom of the image as "Consumer technology's best gathering is in 5 days... Register Now" rather than "The best (people and companies) in consumer technology gather in 5 days... Register Now".

What's sad about my garden path interpretation is that gather is not a noun. It got nouned (sorry, I know verbing weirds language) in my head because my internal grammatical taboo radar (GTR), having being silent over so many instances of nouning verbs in techie writing, didn't even register my garden path interpretation as bogus.

Sigh. It's with instances like this when I am really unsure whether to be a prescriptivist or a descriptivist.

Posted by Vishy at 12:31 AM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2007

Why are there no obituaries for rich client applications on the Mac?

[Happy New Year to all my readers! -V]

The technology press loves to publish eulogies to rich client software that runs on desktop computers. The era of the rich client application is over, they say. People are already storing a lot of their computing lives online, on Web applications hosted by the likes of Google. Microsoft, the middle-aged software company, which has become so obese as to take 5 years to produce an operating system upgrade, cannot stem the tide of people flocking in hordes to online counterparts of their flagship rich client applications.

Yet rich client applications are alive and well on the Macintosh. There is a host of rich client applications on the Mac for very specialized purposes despite the existence of online alternatives: buying music (iTunes instead of mp3.com and emusic.com), arranging photos (iPhoto instead of Picasa), instant messaging (iChat instead of Meebo) and email (Apple Mail instead of GMail or Yahoo! Mail). Even sundries like a programmer's text editor (TextMate) are available as full versions only after paying a fee. In a time when free is the new pink and giving away software and services has become de rigeur, let's consider why Macs appear to tolerate the business model of old school, unhosted, shrink-wrapped software much better than PCs.

1. Most Mac users are passionate and picky about user experience. Owning a Mac has never been about the value. Mac users know they are paying a premium for a superior user experience. No matter how much Web technologies advance, a Web application running inside a general-purpose browser cannot beat the user experience provided by a rich client application that accomplishes a small set of tasks with a user interface built for a particular purpose. Rich client applications, for the most part, also have unrestricted access to the local filesystem, which enables them to store more nuanced user preferences.
2. Mac users in general are mobile than PC users. Laptop sales have exceeded desktop sales for some time now. Most Macs sold are laptops rather than desktops; as a result, a higher percentage of Mac users are mobile compared to PC users. Mobility is the perfect antidote to the limitations of most rich-client applications. Think about it: if your choices were between using rich client applications on a computer that you have with you at all times and having your applications accessible at all times on a Web site, wouldn't you rather pick the first and have a richer user experience not subject to the vagaries of reliable Internet access?
3. Enterprises have generally not adopted Macs. Enterprise adoption of the Macintosh platform has traditionally been low, although an enterprise-capable Unix underlies Mac OS X. Rich client applications are usually more problematic than Web applications for an enterprise because they raise problems of versioning, deployment, support and user training. By using Web applications where appropriate, an enterprise can alleviate most of these problems. Rich client applications, on the other hand, work well enough for individual consumers, who don't face the problems of maintaining a uniform environment and policy across thousands of computers. Faced with no such pressure, rich client applications are still suitable for the largely consumer-facing Macintosh platform.
4. Software for the Mac is a seller's market. There is so little software available specifically for the Mac that its passionate users will gladly adopt even intentionally crippled rich client software, so long as it is well designed for the few tasks it can do. Contrast this to the Windows platform, where dozens of third-party applications and online services--many of them badly written--compete for a given market segment. iTunes is undoubtedly a crippled application, whose several arbitrary restrictions can be overcome by open source alternatives. Yet, it is the only way to buy music from the iTunes Music Store. Apple has chosen not even to augment the iTunes user experience with a Web component because its users are happy enough with the experience of a rich client music store application.

Continued adherence to the creed of rich client applications could well restrict the choices available to Mac users because the cost to switch away from a rich client application is higher than the cost to switch away from a Web application.

We are in an age where the operating system a computer runs is beginning to matter less and less because most common needs can be fulfilled online. Rich client applications on the Mac present an interesting counterexample to this trend. Surely a clique of rich-client applications on the Mac cannot swim against the tide of increasing adoption of Web applications? Yet, the Mac may end up making us all "think different" about this question.

Posted by Vishy at 09:51 PM | Comments (1)